


bad habits for good ideas

by warboyziri



Series: hansy prompt fics for practice [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, fluff exists, hansy is life, i'm just practicing, prompt was on a tumblr post
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 13:59:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7979209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warboyziri/pseuds/warboyziri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m a fashion major and I’m working on my illustrations and maybe I’ve had too much coffee but I swear I just saw one of the mannequins move so here I am calling you in the middle of the night please help I’m scared” AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bad habits for good ideas

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not very good at following the prompts at the moment. hence the practice.

Around 2.47am, Pansy ran out of sugar. It wasn’t her fault—though Daphne loved to say that her pretentious brown sugar boxes always came in smaller sizes than regular ones and ran out faster because brown sugar “wasn’t as sugary” and was hence needed in larger amounts. But Pansy couldn’t help it—white sugar _ruined_ the whole thing. If she wanted her coffee to taste like one of Padma Patil’s Indian deserts, she would go to her café and dunk two _barfis_ in it. She had been out of creamer for like, a week, and so she was left with a half empty jar of _Nescafé Gold_ , and water.

Pansy needed _something_ to make it taste like an ingestible drink. She hadn’t poured too much of the whiskey in it, just a responsible, desperate amount. She had twenty-two designs to sketch before tomorrow, dammit. Pansy wouldn’t be so stupid as to let herself go with _whiskey_ the night before she had _twenty-two_ _sketches_ due.

Around 3.43am, Pansy dropped her sketching, her coffee, the Glen Fiddich inside of the coffee, and burst out of her dorm with her phone in one hand and a charcoal pencil clutched in another. She called him without even planning a course of action. Her fingers just scrolled down, found his number and pressed _dial_ before her brain could even approve of the scrolling down bit.

The phone rang five times before it was picked up by a creature that spoke through a language of shuffling and scrambling. “Hello?” Pansy breathed, crouched on the stairway of her dorm. “ _Hello?_ ”

Finally, a human noise—a groan—came from the other side. “Hmmf, _hello_?” came his voice, cracking and breaking with sleepiness. “Hmm?”

“Potter”, Pansy said to him, “you have to wake up and help me. I’m being haunted.”

Potter took a few seconds to register her identity and her demand. “Pansy”, he said, after a while, still on the verge of sleep, “just because Malfoy is out of town doesn’t give you the right to play pranks on me in the middle of the night—”

“I’m not _joking_ , Potter. The fucking _mannequins_ in my dorm are _moving_ okay I need your _help—_ ”

“The mannequins? Seriously?”

“Potter, _please_ ”, Pansy relented the last of her pride, “I’m either going to hyperventilate and die if I go in there alone or stay here all night and freeze to death.”

“Stay he—where are you?”

Pansy looked at the sign. “The stairwell on the fourth floor”, she said, teeth chattering from the cold.

There was a small frame of three very long seconds in which her phone receiver was full of Potter’s whispered curses. Then, at last, he replied. “Stay there” was all he said before hanging up.

Pansy counted to two hundred and fifty-four before Potter came down in loud _slip-slaps_ of his bathroom slippers. It was cold—Pansy hadn’t been able to feel her fingers in all of the two hundred and fifty-four counts—and yet, he just trudged down in his boxers and a t-shirt, wearing his glasses on top of a deep, exhausted frown that he directed straight at Pansy when he spotted her.

“It’s almost four in the morning, Pansy, did you know that?” he said to her bitterly, swinging open the door out of the stairwell and leaving her behind. “Four _fucking_ am. And you’re wide awake, making friends with animated mannequins.”

Pansy scuttled into the corridor behind him and couldn’t process enough data to retort. “I have twenty-two sketches due for mid-semester review tomorrow. I have to be wide awake. The _mannequins_ , on the other hand, have no requirement to be walking around—aah!”

She sprang away, startled by a noise behind a door as they walked to her room. Knocked to the opposite wall, Potter stared at her like she was an asylum escapee. “Just how much coffee have you had today?” he asked, staring at her restless hands.

“My caffeine levels are completely fucking normal”, Pansy snapped.

They reached her room, with its blown up vintage _Vogue_ cover on the door. “Let’s see if the mannequins agree”, Potter drawled, kicking the door open and startling Pansy again.

“ _Stop it_ ”, she whispered, but Potter had already gone in.

The first thing he did was switch on the lights. Then he looked around at the mannequins—all two of them. Then he spotted the whiskey and hung back his head in exhausted defeat.

“I can explain that”, Pansy squeaked.

“Coffee and _whiskey_? Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“I ran out of sugar!”, Pansy cried, “I just put it in the coffee _once_.”

“After which the mannequin made its move, I’m assuming.”

“I’m not drunk, Potter”, Pansy said, “You know one cup of spiked coffee won’t do shit for me.”

Potter groaned, whispering something like ‘ _I do know that_ ’ to himself. He rubbed his face, then turned to her again. “But you _are_ overworked. And jacked up on coffee. I’m willing to bet you made this dent in the coffee jar all by yourself, all today.”

Pansy flopped on her couch, touching her sketchbook. “I was trying to fish for brilliant ideas”, she said to the air in front of her in a small voice.

She felt the couch jump as Potter flopped down next to her. “If you made _that_ ”, he said, pointing to the midnight blue sheath dress she’d banged out just before the incident with the questionable mannequins “then there’s no need to fish for anything. That’s really good.”

“I need to show twenty-two of these”, Pansy huffed.

Potter had grabbed her sketchbook by then and was looking through the illustrations as he asked, “And how many do you have now?”

“Twenty-eight”, Pansy replied, quietly. Potter slammed the book shut.

“But not all of them are this good!”, Pansy explained, fending off the arms trying to jostle her repeatedly, “I need all of them to be this goo—let _go_ , Potter!”

“Four in the morning!” Potter made a show of throttling her and she laughed, “For _redundancy_ , fuck’s sake—”

“I couldn’t sleep anyway, too much coffee”, she remarked, and then jumped away from another pouncing attack. Laughing, she took her sketchbook and threw it out of Potter’s reach. “What do you want me to do?”

“ _Sleep_.”

“I can’t”, she cried, “I’m telling you, the moment you leave and I switch off the lights—”

“Not with the bloody mannequins again.”

“I just—I _won’t_ be able to sleep, I’m telling you.”

There was a split second of pause in Potter’s posture, and then he was moving again. Toward _her_.

“Come here”, he said, “I’ll help you relax.”

Pansy was still in that magical bubble of time and space where she could do things like have _tickle fights_ with Harry Potter and not think about their natural rivalry and Draco’s newfound attraction to his ex-girlfriend and the fact that before, Harry Potter hadn’t had a single _limb_ that attracted Pansy, and at the age of twenty, the guy looked like he was made just to tease her. But Potter just vaulted from that bubble into— _another_ bubble? Because this definitely wasn’t _reality_.

Reality had no infrastructure for a moment where Harry Potter, hero of the downtrodden, _yanked_ on Pansy’s pajama-clad legs and kissed her slowly, but _imperiously_ , while Pansy still struggled with the question of— _huh_?

_Really,_ was the answer. It _really_ was happening. She was kissing him back—she couldn’t _not_. At first, her mind posed the question where this head-spinning activity could do anything to make her actually relax. Then his hand snuck up and moved into her hair, while the other went down, _down_. And she understood. _Relished_. Harry Potter was an _excellent_ nighttime rescuer.

“Weren’t you sleepy, Potter”, she said somewhere into his neck, sitting somewhere in the area occupied by his body, “what happened to ‘it’s four _fucking_ am’?”

Potter shut her up effectively with a long, lingering kiss. “Tell me that twenty-eight designs are enough”, he said, long after she’d forgotten what they were talking about, “And I’ll sleep right now.”

Pansy dithered. He took the opportunity.

“I just—” Potter kissed her quiet.

“But—” He laid her down on the couch and transferred his attention to her sliding t-shirt, lips still exploring the skin of her neck.

“Fine”, she caved. And Potter was up, picking her up and off the couch, onto the bed within seconds.

Around 4.01am, Pansy was falling asleep, topless, surrounded by Potter’s bare, hairy arms. The mannequins hid, chagrined. The spiked coffee had lost the battle.


End file.
